To check whether smartmontools and smartctl has been installed properly , issue the following command in the terminal window (root):

# smartctl -i /dev/sda2

Note : Replace sda2 with your hard disk device file

This should show detailed information about your hard disk, for example in my case I got the following output:

Once everthing is working fine, we can go-ahead and install the GUI for smartctl - "GSmartControl"

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Features

* Automatically report and highlight any abnormal SMART information.
* Ability to enable / disable SMART.
* Ability to enable / disable Automatic Offline Data Collection - A short
* self-check that the drive will perform automatically every four hours with no
impact on performance.
* Ability to set global and per-drive options for smartctl.
* Display drive identity, capabilities, attributes, error and self-test logs.
* Perform SMART self-tests.
* Ability to load smartctl output as a "virtual" device, which acts just like a
real (read-only) device.
* Works on most smartctl-supported operating systems.
* Extensive help information.